Is anyone familiar with Internet America?  Has anyone ever used their service anywhere?  They don't obviously state their service areas on their site.  I'm asking because I have been giving a lot of thought to the problem of getting good Internet access out to rural areas, and I found them while researching.

I found this video.  It's a youtube promo video basically.  It does bring up some very key concepts about how you could go about making something like this work.

I was considering starting an "open source" style effort to create a body of knowledge and volunteers to coordinate with people in these areas to help them build their own networks.  Perhaps creating co-ops like many rural electric co-ops.  Since I do have a ISP and network engineering background, I have enough technical knowledge to coordinate a technical discussion of the problems and assist locals as we travel.

Instead, I may volunteer or coordinate with this company (or any others that may exist) that seems to already have a working model.  I just wonder if they are actually any good.  If anyone has any positive or negative experiences with them, I'd love to hear about it.  I don't really want to get tangled up with a company that doesn't provide good service or has poor customer service.

Thanks,
Damon

 

Not a clue. While it appears that they may provide some sort of multi-state service, I wasn't able to locate anything besides Texas in my quick search.

I think that most of us use either satellite or cellular. In our experience, Verizon EVDO trumps Sprint EVDO when it comes to getting a signal out in the boondocks.